“Jaw Laoshy” and Teaching Chinese

‘‘JAW LAOSHY’’ AND TEACHING CHINESE EDITED AND INTRODUCED BY PERRY LINK University of California INTRODUCTION Perry Link University of California A teacher, in some ways, is like a gardener—crucial at the stage of planting, and helpful in the provision of sufficient light, water, and fertilizer, as well as weeding out unwanted growths. In the end, however, any gardener (teacher) is far from able to control, or even to know about, the number, size, and shape of every leaf that he or she helped to grow. Rulan Chao Pian (a.k.a., Jaw laoshy 趙老師) had two very different kinds of students. Her Ph.D. students in musicology, well represented elsewhere in this issue of CHINOPERL, might be viewed as her most well-tended and carefully pruned fruit trees. She knew each peach and plum well, and in her later years could enumerate them with pride. Her other students, vastly more in number but unknowable in anywhere near the same intimacy, were her Chinese language students. In her quarter-century teaching elementary Chinese at Harvard there were hundreds, perhaps even a thousand, of them. In nurturing these students—this broader field of grain—the correct planting of the seeds was indeed crucial (get your tones right!), but the harvest provided nourishment not only for musicology but for China studies in every discipline—as well, for that matter, as many pursuits outside academe, such as public service, journalism, and commerce. There is no way she, or anyone, could have kept track of the far-reaching effects of her language teaching. The section that follows contains essays by four people who began their study of Chinese with Rulan Pian and one who served as her colleague in language-teaching. The five are all scholars—their fields include political science, history, and literature. (I should apologize, perhaps, for not finding a diplomat, journalist, or banker to contribute, just to illustrate my claim above, but the reader will find that the five pieces below already make this point fairly well.) The five essays, although brief, range widely, touching on topics as various as how long the tongue should rest on the hard palate to produce a certain sound, the pioneering steps of a woman in a male academic world, Chinese disillusionment with Wilsonian promises of cosmopolitan democracy, and the relationship between language learning and performance. This variety, although still insufficient to present its subject in her full complexity, does remind us of some of the important backgrounds to her life, and several of her ancillary competences, that we might otherwise overlook. But beyond the variety of the five essays, readers will notice at least one persistent theme: Rulan Pian was rigorous, and meticulous about the rigor, but CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature 33.2 (December 2014): 158–179 # The Permanent Conference on Chinese Oral and Performing Literature, Inc. 2014 DOI: 10.1179/0193777414Z.00000000025 playful at the same time. Life was serious; life was fun. Readers of Bell Yung’s essay in this issue will see that this was just as much a part of her musicological work as her language teaching. RULAN CHAO PIAN June Teufel Dreyer University of Miami I first met Mrs. Pian, in 1961, as a terrified first-year student at the doorway of Chinese Aab in Two Divinity Avenue, home of ‘‘Far Eastern Languages’’ at Harvard University. It is strange to think that she was at least twenty years younger then than I am now. Mrs. Pian greeted me and the others graciously and, although I wish I could say that this assuaged my concerns, I was grateful for her efforts to do so. I’d heard that the course was very difficult; that many people dropped out in the first few weeks. Would I have to return home in disgrace? The other students, some of them faculty members at Harvard or elsewhere, seemed intimidating. Some carried heavy leather briefcases, in stark contrast to my small green bookbag. I ate my lunch sitting on the common room sofa, facing a large oil portrait of Empress Dowager Cixi. She did not look encouraging. The weeks to follow were challenging. I had a difficult time distinguishing second tone from...